The Munich Central Collecting Point was a depot used by the
Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program after the end of the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
to process, photograph and redistribute artwork and cultural artifacts that had been confiscated by the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hit ...
and hidden throughout Germany and Austria.
Other Central Collecting Points were located at
Marburg
Marburg ( or ) is a university town in the German federal state (''Bundesland'') of Hesse, capital of the Marburg-Biedenkopf district (''Landkreis''). The town area spreads along the valley of the river Lahn and has a population of approx ...
,
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden () is a city in central western Germany and the capital of the state of Hesse. , it had 290,955 inhabitants, plus approximately 21,000 United States citizens (mostly associated with the United States Army). The Wiesbaden urban area ...
and
Offenbach, with the overall aim of giving restitution for the artifacts to their countries of origin.
[
Lieutenant Craig Hugh Smyth was responsible for establishing the Munich Central Collecting Point in July 1945, converting former Nazi Party offices into a depot complete with photography studios and conservation labs. The depot's activities were directed by Herbert S. Leonard.
The Munich Central Collecting Point mainly processed artwork from European museums and private collections, including Hitler's collection found at ]Altaussee
Altaussee (Central Bavarian: ''Oid Aussee'') is a municipality and spa town in the district of Liezen in Styria, Austria. The small village is nestled on the shores of the Lake Altaussee, beneath the Loser Plateau. Occupying an area of 92&nbs ...
. This included paintings, sculptures, metalwork and other objects. These restitution activities at Munich ceased in 1951.[
In 2016 investigative journalists at Suddeutsche Zeitung reported that ]Commission for Looted Art in Europe
The Commission for Looted Art in Europe is a non-profit organization, that researches looted art, and helps formulate restitution policy, for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
It was organized in 1999. Anne Webber, and David Lewis ar ...
(CLAE), had discovered that "The Monuments Men tracked down Nazi looted art. Only for German museum directors to return it to the families of the Nazi leaders rather than to the Jewish families who were its rightful owners."National Archives and Records Administration
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an " independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It i ...
. There is a further archive of photographs, and microfilm
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. F ...
copies of the inventory cards, in the Photographic Archives at the National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of ch ...
in Washington, DC
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
.[
]
See also
* Münchner Haus der Kulturinstitute
References
External links
List of records at the National Archives
{{Authority control
Art and cultural repatriation after World War II
1940s in Munich